To broaden the base of this study’s original transcription work, I also included short excerpts from published and unpublished musical examples of several other transcribers. Credited for their fine contributions throughout part 5 are Jamey Aebersold, David Baker, Todd Coolman, Bill Dobbins, Pat Harbison, Barry Harris, Kenny Kirkwood, Thomas Owens, Lewis Porter, Don Sickler, Ken Slone, Steven Strunk, Dick Washburn, and Robert Witmer.
Because of the study’s interest in bridging such worlds as music theory, performance practice, composition, cognition, history, cultural interpretation, and so on, I sought criticism from colleagues with different specializations who kindly agreed to serve as readers. I am grateful to them for sharing their responses with me and raising various issues for consideration during the work’s revision. At Northwestern University, sociologist Howard Becker, composer Michael Pisaro, music theorist Richard Ashley, historian Sarah Maza, and choreographer and dancer Lynne Blom read individual chapters. Giving an entire draft of the manuscript a thorough reading were jazz keyboardist-composer Joan Wildman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; ethnomusicologist and jazz bassist Robert Witmer at York University, Toronto; ethnomusicologist and jazz trumpeter Ingrid Monson at the University of Chicago, and, at the same institution, Keith Sawyer, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology; Stephen Ramsdell and James Dossa; and three participants in the original interviews, pianist Howard Levy, trumpeter Bobby Rogovin, and drummer Paul Wertico. Pianist Barry Harris also looked over many portions and made important recommendations for revision. Additionally, Christopher Rudmose brought her fine editorial eye to several’ chapters, and folklorist Linda Morley generously shared her talents by meticulously examining the last two drafts of the work and making sensitive editorial suggestions throughout.
Over the years, I have also derived inspiration from discussions with several associates with common interests in ethnographic research and in jazz. They include sociologist Howard Becker and performance ethnographer Dwight Conquergood at my own institution; musicologist Lawrence Gushee and ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl at the University of Illinois; ethnomusicologist Christopher Waterman at the University of Washington; bassoonist and music history professor Joseph Urbinato at Roosevelt University; and composer T. J. Anderson, formerly at Tufts University. Additionally, many friends have consulted on one point or another or shared records and other pertinent materials with me. The limitations of space prevent my acknowledging each by name, but, at the very least, let me thank my colleagues Karen Hansen, Eddie Meadows, Thomas Owens, Lawrence Pinto, Lewis Porter, Don Roberts, Bob WeIland, and fellow Barry Harris workshop members cited in this work, Franklin Gordon, Jeff Morgan, and Al Olivier. Also, I would like to express special gratitude to David Dann of station WJFF 90.5 FM in Jeffersonville, New York, who assisted me in tracking down essential discograpbical information; to David Pituh and Ruth Charloff, who brought great powers of concentration to proofing the final manuscript and made valuable editorial recommendations; and to Michael Kocour, who contributed the photograph that appears in example 3.5. Students in my improvisation courses at Northwestern University have also been a constant source of stimulation, expanding my own understanding of the subject.
As the project evolved, I often felt the supportive presence over my shoulder of three old friends who encouraged the research from its onset but, sadly, passed away before its conclusion. Robert Share, director at the Berklee College of Music, was a dedicated college administrator with an early inspirational vision for jazz education. Lynne Blom, associate professor of dance at Northwestern University, was an innovator in choreography and dance improvisation pedagogy. Klaus Wachsmann, my predecessor at the same institution, was an ethnomusiciologist and a gentleman who always raised the imaginative, challenging questions.
Finally, seeing me through the trials and tribulations that long-term projects inevitably encounter has been the unwavering support of my parents, Ann and Joseph, my sister, Nancy, and my brother, Carl. And, of course, I am greatly indebted to Gabriel Dotto, former music editor at the University of Chicago Press, and to T. David Brent, senior editor, for their belief in the work and for the respectful treatment it received in their hands.
INTRODUCTION
Picking Notes out of Thin Air?
Improvisation and Its Study
I used to think, How could jazz musicians pick notes out of thin air? I had no idea of the knowledge it took. It was like magic to me at the time. -Calvin Hill
Energized by its vitality, transported by its affective powers, and awed by its elegance and cohesion, listeners might well imagine that jazz was thoroughly composed and rehearsed before its presentation. Yet jazz artists commonly perform without musical scores and without a specialized conductor to coordinate their performances. They may never have met before the event nor played together in any other setting. Contributing further to the mystique surrounding jazz is the transient and unique nature of jazz creations; each performance’s evolving ideas, sustained momentarily by the air waves, vanish as new developments overtake them, seemingly never to be repeated. That jazz performers improvise their music, a common explanation for these marvels, begs the more difficult question: Just what is improvisation? A popular general dictionary maintains that “to improvise is to compose, or simultaneously compose and perform, on the spur of the moment and without any preparation.”1 Similarly, a prestigious music dictionary has, until recently, asserted that improvisation is the “art of performing music spontaneously, without the aid of manuscript, sketches or memory.”2 Such definitions reflect the common view that the activity of improvisation comprises neither the faithful re-creation of a composition nor the elaboration of prefigured musical ideas. In the absence of such models or goals, it follows that there is no music for improvisers to prepare for performance. Indeed, they must perform spontaneously and intuitively.
At times, remarks by musicians appear to support this argument. “I have no idea what I am going to do when I take a solo,” Doc Cheatham says. “That’s the thing that I don’t understand myself, and I’ve been asked about it so many times. When I play a solo, I never know any more about what I am going to play than you do.”3 George Duvivier also does not “want to go into a solo with anything preconceived.” He finds it “best to go in with an open mind and let it develop.” Other veterans advised Kenny Washington as a youngster “not to think about playing—just play.”
Faced with authoritative definitions that, in effect, describe improvisation in terms of what it is not rather than in terms of what it is, earnest young performers are amazed by the abilities of their idols. They ruminate over issues as fundamental as they are intriguing: Precisely what is the music that jazz groups perform, and where does it come from? To the young Arthur Rhames, the “cats” seemed to be “standing up and making something out of nothing.” Resolving this paradox for himself at the time, he decided that jazz was “just something the fellas got together and played out of their heads.”
Such explanations may temporarily satisfy observers, but continued probing soon presents new puzzles. Wynton Marsalis noticed early on that, although the things created by the artists changed from event to event, he could, nevertheless, recognize aspects of artists’ styles in their new creations. How can performances embody these enigmatic qualities, and what is their significance for the artists themselves? In Marsalis’s recollection, “all of these giants could play and sound different.” His idols remain vivid in his mind’s eye after years of experience. “Here’s Miles,” he says, and sings a phrase by Miles Davis.
I’d say, “Damn, why did he play like that?”
Here’s Trane. [He sings a passage by John Coltrane.] He’s playing just the exact opposite. Why is he playing like that?
Here’s Newk [Sonny Rollins] playing some rhythms that still nobody else can keep up with. Why is Newk doing that?
Here’s Diz [Dizzy Gillespie] and Clark Terry and Pops [Louis Armstrong]. . .. My father was a ridiculous [amazing] pianist. He
can play. Damn, how does a cat play like that?
When you’re just learning jazz, everything is mystical.
For those outside the jazz community who discover improvisers as mature artists through their recordings, these issues remain mysterious. For prospective musicians who wish to follow in the footsteps of their idols, however, unraveling the mystery is essential.
Studying the Learning of Improvisation
I have shared the artist’s captivation with these issues since the fifties: initially as a classically trained, aspiring trumpeter trying to learn jazz, and over the past fifteen years as an ethnomusicologist carrying out formal research for this study of jazz improvisation. Roots of this research also lie in my work among the Shona people of Zimbabwe, which left me with a lasting appreciation for the depth of oral musical traditions, the rigors of composing music in performance, and the intelligence with which musicians articulate the subtleties of their art.
Influenced by my experience and earlier research, I approached this jazz project with the conviction that there is far more to improvisation than meets the ear. Still, every study is unique. For scholars entering a music culture not their own, the path to understanding is rarely clear-cut; it demands constant absorption, interpretation, and synthesis of bits of information obtained from different sources by various methods. Determining the appropriate methods invariably involves finding the benefits and limitations of each—often by trial and error. In some respects, the challenges are comparable to those faced by young artists seeking musical knowledge within the music community itself. To serve the needs of a preliminary study on the subject, I ultimately combined various approaches to data collection, analysis, and interpretation.
At the outset of the pilot study in 1978, I brushed up on my general knowledge of jazz from secondary sources, sampling articles, books, and dissertations. Jazz writing falls typically into several basic, sometimes overlapping, categories: autobiographies by major jazz figures, largely anecdotal biographies, compilations of interviews with different artists, bibliographies, discographies, and historical interpretations of the music’s development chronicling successive style periods. Complementing these are works of jazz criticism, textbooks describing musical features, analytical studies of great solo styles, sociological accounts of the jazz community, philosophical speculation on the nature of improvisation in relation to composition, and improvisation method books representing various theoretical approaches. Despite the importance of all these sources, it seems to me that, taken together, they gave but discrete glimpses into the individual and collective processes of learning, transmitting, and improvising jazz.
Although welcome changes occurred in the general state of the jazz literature over the course of the larger study, there were no precise models to guide the research as I envisioned it. At one point or another, however, exceptional writings by a few scholars and authors confirmed my research goals or indicated some fruitful possibilities: critical, interpretative, and biographical writing about jazz in the broader context of the African diaspora and African American culture by Richard Waterman (1948, 1967), Amiri Baraka (1963, 1970), and A. B. Spellman (1966); Charles Keil’s early article on interactive aspects of jazz that argues for understanding “the [musical] system or style in action, music as a creative act rather than as an object” (l996b, 338); Thomas Owens’s painstaking transcriptions and analyses of Charlie Parker’s improvisations (1974); Frank Tirro’s writing on the historical dimensions of improvised solos (1974); and the first volume of Gunther Schuller’s history of jazz (1968). Additionally, there were phenomenological accounts of particular facets of learning and improvisation by Alfred Pike (1974) and David Sudnow (1978); John McKinney’s study of Lennie Tristano as a teacher (1978); sociologist Howard Becker’s work (1951; 1953) and that of Alan Merriam and Raymond Mack (1960) treating the jazz community as a community both implicitly and explicitly. Offering rich sources of data were Jelly Roll Morton’s autobiography with Alan Lomax (Lomax, 1973), Dizzy Gillespie’s autobiography with Al Fraser (Gillespie 1979), Baby Dodds’s narrative recording (1946), and interview compilations appearing in works by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (1966) and Whitney Balliett (1971, 1977), and a few others.
From a comparative cultural viewpoint, other writings were also influential. Albert Lord’s classic study of Serbo-Croatian epic sung poetry (1970), positing a theory of formulaic oral composition and re-creation, seems to me, as it has to several other scholars, to have relevance for the study of jazz. Bruno Nettl’s comparative work on improvisation (1974) was also helpful in identifying important issues for research and in clarifying thorny problems concerning improvisation in relation to oral and written composition.
At the beginning of my research, I held what I thought was a reasonably clear notion of the distinction between improvisation and various other practices associated with composition. When, as an early exercise, I tried to draw up a precise list of their exclusive properties, however, I realized that my grasp of them was less strong than I had thought. In fact, their characteristics seemed to overlap hopelessly at the margins. Constant tautologies also plagued my thinking about the distinctions. Was a particular musical practice improvisation or not? If one defines improvisation in such a way as to include the practice, then, presumably, it is.
To extract myself from this quagmire, I decided to set aside such questions temporarily and return to them only at the end of my research. I decided to focus initially on close observation and description of the full range of musical activities that occupied active members of a community known for its expertise in improvisation. My hope was that this would eventually lead to an understanding of just what improvisation is in relation to other compositional processes. Moreover, given what is perhaps the most fundamental finding of ethnomusicology—that the bases for music and musical knowledge in aesthetic values, goals, and outlook can differ substantially from one culture to the next-understanding how the artists themselves viewed the issue, how they defined their own musical practices, was of central importance. My personal experience as a jazz learner before studying ethnomusicology left me with a certain feel for this matter, but my intention was to keep my own impressions in the background of the study. I wanted to begin anew, to make a more formal effort to understand the concepts of others and thereby extend my own understanding. The artists’ view of the subject became a distinctive focus of this work, one that emerged as imperative for a serious analytical work on jazz improvisation.4
As I was reviewing the relevant literature, I initiated field research by seeking access to artists. It is still largely the case, as it was when I began this work, that if one wants to learn the intricacies of jazz improvisation, one must learn them directly from musicians. Initially, I had the opportunity to interact with several musicians in Chicago, studying privately with some individuals while performing and recording with others in a group I had organized.5 I also carried out informal interviews during this period, testing the viability of talking about the elusive issues involved by asking particular questions, and found the early results to be encouraging. After working with several musicians in Chicago, I moved, in 1980, to New York City—the world’s largest jazz community, made up of artists from all across the country—and began familiarizing myself with the setting I had selected for the larger study. Over the year, I devoted one component of the research to extensive interviews with the more than fifty musicians named in the acknowledgements and in the list of artists interviewed, located in appendix B. Whereas interviews have been a standard ethnomusicological method in the past, a unique feature of this study is its involvement with a large enough pool of participants to portray the diverse and complex texture of the larger community they represent. Most participants were individuals I approached in nightclubs after admiring a performance. Many were known to me by reputation; others I became acquainted with for the first time; a few were friends I had performed with years earlier and who had since become established in the field of jaz
z.
In each instance, I explained something of my own background and that of the study. I conveyed my interest in jazz education, in redressing such issues as stereotypes about improvisation and the lack of general understanding that limits potential audiences for jazz. Despite the contribution of jazz as a unique musical language—one of the world’s most sophisticated—the marginal existence of jazz musicians and the negative feedback to their community from some of the writings about jazz leave many of its practitioners with the perception that their skills are poorly understood, even downright misunderstood, and their knowledge undervalued by outsiders. From the jazz community’s view-point, the observations of even the most attentive of scholars and critics have periodically created offense by imposing outsider perspectives on jazz that are alien to the music and unsympathetic to the artists.6 Discussions revealing this and similar lingering issues for jazz musicians helped me to resolve what had been an initial apprehension conceming the appropriateness of probing into the private inner world of jazz performance and making available to outsiders what has largely remained knowledge privileged within a close-knit community. The willingness on the part of musicians to participate reaffirmed for me the importance of the project’s objectives.
Interviews took place in my apartment or in the homes of musicians and lasted typically from one and a half to three hours. As a way of showing participants my own scholarly approach to music, I began each session by giving the artist a copy of The Soul of Mbira, my book on Zimbabwean music, and one of its accompanying albums of field recordings.7 In many instances, the artists themselves had a serious interest in African music, and if their schedules allowed, I played my Zimbabwean instruments for them before we turned our attention to jazz. In some instances, additional sessions, phone conversations, and informal meetings in between sets at nightclubs helped to clarify points raised in earlier discussions.
Thinking in Jazz Page 2
